Traffic Processing

Overview

The next step after classification is processing of the captured stream(s). Processing involves performing
operations on the traffic such as prioritization, limiting or guaranteeing a level of service.

Typical ways of processing traffic are prioritizing VoIP traffic, giving each user an equal share of available
bandwidth, and de-prioritizing P2P / file sharing traffic. See the Tutorial for some
examples of rules that demonstrate some typical processing scenarios.

Processing Methods (Basic)

Rule Name

Enter a name for the rule. Names are for descriptive purposes only and may be
changed without any effect on operation. Rules are allowed to have duplicate names.

Rule Enabled

When this item is checked, the rule will be processed by the server. Otherwise it will be ignored, but
still saved to file. Changes to a rule are also allowed while it is disabled.

Limit Speed

Enter the maximum amount of bandwidth that may be used, in bytes per second (B/s). (To roughly convert bits
to bytes it is fine to just multiply by 10).

You can enter any value between 1 and 1,000,000,000 bytes per second (1 GB/s), the values in the list
are suggestions only.

If the user attempts to use more bandwidth, the traffic is queued within the product until there is room
on the line to send more. Queue limits can be adjusted to suit different protocols (see Maximum Queue
Size in the Advanced Processing section).

Priority Level

You can give traffic absolute right-of-way over other traffic by increasing its priority level. During
congestion, only high priority traffic is processed. Lower priority traffic is only processed when
there is no higher priority traffic queued.